Hugh Hayden: American Food

Lisson Gallery presents Hugh Hayden’s first solo exhibition in the UK. It is also the first to directly engage with Hayden’s culinary installation practice, bringing together wooden picnic tables, cast-iron skillets, and a multimedia stove to reflect on the history and significance of cooking and dining together in America.

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Influenced by his background as an architect – in particular designing concepts for new restaurants – Hayden is interested in African cultural inflections on food, art and music. Hayden considers Southern cooking the first uniquely American cuisine, having originated in kitchens run by the enslaved cooks, who infused recipes with African tastes, ingredients and techniques. For the artist, Texas-born and New York-based, the African origins and contributions in the creation of America’s cuisine are equally embedded in the country’s cultural and economic development and lasting infrastructure. More specifically, Hayden is “interested in celebrating the indebtedness to African origins in the cooking – as a form of creation of America, Western culture and Modern Art”.

The exhibition features a variety of new and recent works, including 27 ‘skillets’, recast from a unique pairing of a wooden West African style mask and a found cast iron frying pan. The function and form of both the skillets as early African cookware and the masks’ ancestral and ceremonial origins are merged in a technique called sand-casting; Hayden adopts this rudimentary means of manufacture to celebrate the imperfectness of the materials, their colonial histories, and the inherent loss of detail in the reproduction process. Hayden likens the abstraction of the original objects that occurs in the sand-casting process as a form of diaspora that transforms the skillets into something layered and culturally syncretic. The artist also holds this mirror up to his own identity as an African American: an abstraction on the African antecedent.

Hayden also unveils a new series of commissioned picnic tables, presented indoors and in the gallery’s courtyard, created from specially sourced wood with protruding branches and sculpted thorns. Hayden is known for using politically charged materials; for his 2018 exhibition at Lisson Gallery New York he travelled to the US-Mexico border, at the height of immigration disputes, to gather wood for their native and/or invasive status. Here, he uses two species found growing across the UK – the native Hornbeam and the ‘honorary native’ Chestnut. The democratic gesture of Hayden’s picnic tables are complicated by the rich history of these woods: the hornbeam coppiced from rootstock was believed to be planted by the Romans as a natural boundary, and the Chestnut was naturalised after being introduced from continental Europe to feed their soldiers.

Alongside these, a new multimedia stove is presented, playing a recording of the artist cooking and eating bacon – a foundational ingredient of Southern food as the fat was historically used to ‘season’ a skillet. Activating the exhibition with the presence of the artist, this work alludes to the continued embedding of Southern culture and community in America and beyond today.

American Food follows the opening of Hayden’s solo show, Creation Myths, at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA, in January 2020, as well as the recent commission at New York City’s newest cultural outpost, The Shed, in 2019. Hayden is also included in the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition Among the Trees, opening 4 March.

About Hugh Hayden
Hugh Hayden’s practice considers the anthropomorphization of the natural world as a visceral lens for exploring the human condition. Hayden transforms familiar objects through a process of selection, carving and juxtaposition to challenge our perceptions of ourselves, others and the environment. Raised in Texas and trained as an architect, his work arises from a deep connection to nature and its organic materials. Hayden utilizes wood as his primary medium, frequently loaded with multi-layered histories in their origin, including objects as varied as discarded trunks, rare indigenous timbers, Christmas trees or souvenir African sculptures. From these he saws, sculpts and sands the wood, often combining disparate species, creating new composite forms that also reflect their complex cultural backgrounds. Crafting metaphors for human existence and past experience, Hayden’s work questions the stasis of social dynamics and asks the viewer to examine their place within an ever-shifting ecosystem.
Hugh Hayden was born in Dallas, Texas in 1983 and lives and works in New York City. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. His work was the subject of a solo exhibition at White Columns in New York in 2018. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including JTT, New York (2018); Clearing, New York (2018); Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (2018); PPOW Gallery, New York (2017); Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York (2017); Postmasters Gallery, New York (2016); MoMA PS1, Rockaway Beach, New York (2014); Socrates Sculpture Park, New York (2014); and Abrons Art Center, New York (2013), among others. He is the recipient of residences at Glenfiddich in Dufftown, Scotland (2014); Abrons Art Center and Socrates Sculpture Park (both 2012), and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2011).

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